The invention relates generally to integration for managing computing components. The invention relates further to mechanism for free-text search for integrating management of applications.
Today, hardware systems and software systems of any kind are typically managed using special tools, often called systems or services management tools. In this context, the term software system may comprise infrastructure applications as well as end user applications. Customers of system management tools often face the problem of managing their information technology (IT) infrastructure, which consists of hardware systems and software systems, through different systems or service management tools, or in applications integrated configuration and/or management tools. Most times, these tools cannot be integrated. Consequently, this means accessing information and a system management through different management systems that usually provide different user interfaces and user experiences by the different tools. This is one of the key reasons why users ask for integration between system management products to have a single point of access for their management infrastructure.
The traditional answer to the integration complaint is, for a system management vendor, to start developing integration logic inside of its product allowing them to work together. This operation is usually very time-consuming because it requires changing the products, and is also limited to the suite of products provided by each vendor. For this reason, this solution is not very effective in case a customer owns products from different vendors and, in the worst case, together with in-house grown management solutions.
This makes apparent the drawback of the traditional approach: it is quite expensive from a development point of view, and it does not offer an “open” solution that allows integrating products from different system management vendors.
There are several disclosures related to an integration method for managing computing components.
Document U.S. Pat. No. 7,890,809 B2 discloses a high level Operational Support System (OSS) framework providing the infrastructure and analytical system to enable all applications and systems to be managed dynamically at runtime regardless of platform or programming technology. Applications are automatically discovered and managed. Java™ applications have the additional advantage of auto-inspection (through reflection) to determine their manageability. Resources belonging to application instances are associated and managed with that application instance. This provides operators the ability to not only manage an application, but its distributed components as well. They are presented as belonging to a single application instance node that may be monitored, analyzed, and managed.
Document U.S. Pat. No. 7,483,978 B2 discloses, in certain embodiments, a method for providing a unified user interface for managing a plurality of heterogeneous computing environments comprising displaying at least a portion of a framework user interface, the framework user interface comprising common functionality and a standard layout for the unified user interface. A listing of a subset of the heterogeneous computing environments may be displayed. Each of the heterogeneous computing environments may be modeled by one or more objects, each object corresponding to a particular computing environment. The method further includes, in response to an interaction request with respect to a particular computing environment, applying an appropriate plug-in, based on a mapping of the object that corresponds to the particular computing environment to the appropriate plug-in to perform the requested interaction.
Thus, there may be a need to overcome limitations from known systems management tools regarding integration needs of users. More particularly, there may be a need to integrate management and configuration systems in a flexible way without predefined programmed integration logic.